Cognition Dissemination: Maybe Sonic Frontiers Needs More Time

Sega finally revealed Sonic Frontiers last week through an IGN-exclusive feature, months after announcing the game at The Game Awards. It doesn’t look very good.

The first previews for video games need to be the best, in an industry with a player base for which first impressions are of the utmost importance. It’s for this reason that Sonic Frontiers will struggle to win a solid reception among the online crowd going forward. Its first two gameplay videos, both extended previews that ran several minutes long, somehow ended up showing very little.

The first video features ample footage of Sonic running around the game’s open world for exploratory purposes, showing how Sonic himself will retain mechanics similar to those from prior 3D titles. But there wasn’t enough for him to use them on. It was a demonstration only slightly better than one of those Sonic Unreal Engine 4 concept videos.

The second gameplay video wasn’t much better, featuring mundane combat footage. This reached its lowest point in the first semi-major battle shown, which involves a poorly-paced fight with an enemy that takes too long to go down. Other battles in the video, one of which is a towering boss, look clumsy and unpolished in action. It doesn’t help that the music feels too calm and mundane, an unfortunate surprise for a franchise with some of the best frenetically-paced music in video games despite the lyrics to the vocal songs being hilariously cheesy. (The cheesiness is not a negative, notably.) The combination of these issues and the realistic color palette are providing serious flashbacks to the legendarily bad Sonic the Hedgehog 2006 reboot. All they need to show is human beings, and we’re all set.

Not that I’m completely against humans existing in a Sonic game. But it would be best if they were implemented in the same way they the first movie (and the second to a lesser extent) and not like the 2006 game. But creating densely populated metropolitan areas to feature them in wouldn’t be easy, especially for a team working on their first open world title.

It’s time for Sega and Sonic Team to ask themselves a serious question. The game was announced with a 2022 target date last year, which hasn’t changed with the newest reveal for not-E3 month. It should. The company evidently wants to release this as close to the Sonic the Hedgehog 2 movie’s theatrical, streaming, and impending home video release as they can, an understandable intention given its nice critical and solid commercial reception. But it will not be worth it if they release an unpolished mess like the one shown in these videos.

I don’t want to be more negative than I need to be here, for a franchise that already receives too much of it: I absolutely believe there’s a good game buried in here. The idea of an open world Sonic game isn’t bad, considering the half steps towards this goal with the Sonic Adventure titles’ hub worlds. This could be realized by taking ideas that worked in those environmental designs and implementing them within the confines of a fully explorable world.

The designers on Frontiers wanted to go beyond that, though, taking inspiration from the likes of The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild — complete with the piano usage in the soundtrack. The world as it was shown in trailers, as a result, lacks cohesion in its design, with too-open fields that feel as if they have landmarks in specific places for the sake of having them. This is one area where the development team should more closely observe BotW’s world design, a game heavily praised for crafting one of the best open worlds in video gaming. It’s not possible for them to incorporate all the same elements from their main inspiration, as Zelda and Sonic games are two different beasts, but cohesion is important.

There remains an open possibility that Sega simply isn’t showing the game’s best content just yet, and the producers and marketers are choosing bad segments to show in these videos. But this is not a common-enough occurrence for video game previews for me to consider it likely, but that doesn’t rule out the possibility. IGN will continue to provide new videos of the game in action throughout the month, so most of its features currently shrouded in mystery will be revealed in due time.

Even if that’s the case, a delay would only give Sonic Team more time to polish it, to ensure that Frontiers will at least be on par with the better 3D Sonic titles. The project should serve as a positive harbinger of things to come for the future of a franchise with quality that continues to be a point of mockery online, regardless of whether that’s deserved. A new game and potential series of them would be perfect for luring lapsed and new fans who’ve both enjoyed the movies and the franchise’s better installments. Whether Sega will go through with pushing it back will depend on whether they care more about potential sales than a good reception, and realize the latter could heavily influence the former after word-of-mouth spreads.